Forty-four-year-old day trader and chemist Mark Barton went on a shooting rampage at two Atlanta brokerage offices, killing nine people and wounding 13.
He eluded police for five hours after the shootings before killing himself as they closed in.
Police later discovered the bludgeoned bodies of his estranged wife and two children in her suburban Stockbridge apartment.
In a note left near his family's bodies, Barton vowed to kill "the people that greedily sought my destruction".
He wrote that he regretted killing his wife, and that he killed his children from a previous marriage, Matthew, 11, and Mychelle, 8, to spare them future pain.
His wife was killed two days before the shooting rampage, his children the day before.
Investigators pieced together a picture of a distraught man who'd been a loner as a teenager, had paranoid tendencies and a quick temper, and was troubled by unexplained fears.
Barton had lost as much as $450,000 on gambling and Internet stock trading in the past year, including $153,000 in a 3-day binge, and $105,000 in the 15-day period before the killing started.
Also, Barton was the only suspect in the 1993 bludgeoning deaths of his first wife and her mother, although he was never charged.
The tragedies prompted close public scrutiny of the day trading industry's policies for disclosing the risks.
Victims and their relatives have filed ten lawsuits in the year following the incident, naming as defendants the two brokerages, their landlords, their security firms and Barton's estate.
